


Where There's Life

by astralis



Category: Falling Skies
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-22
Updated: 2012-12-22
Packaged: 2017-11-22 01:13:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/604185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astralis/pseuds/astralis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anne survives the alien attacks, and keeps surviving.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where There's Life

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jedibuttercup](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jedibuttercup/gifts).



> Please note this story contains depicts of the aftermath of violence and probably contains grief triggers.

The only difference Anne can see between life and death is that alive hurts more. Alone in the world she curls up beneath a stranger's kitchen table, wrapped in blankets torn from someone's bed, and struggles to breathe around the jagged, empty hole left by the death of her husband and her beautiful boy.

(She remembers the long walk home from the hospital, aching legs and blisters on her feet, the terror and hope she felt at every step, and the way everything seemed to shake and sway when another series of bombs came, landing where the hospital had been. Where she had been.) 

(She remembers passing body after body lying in the street and knowing she's too late to save any of them. Whole families who had tried to flee from the aliens and their robots, shot and killed like they were nothing.)

(She remembers realising that her neighborhood was one of those hit by the alien weapons and vomiting into the gutter as the smell of burning and unfamiliar chemicals overwhelmed her.)

(She remembers, and will never forget, that first horrible, heartbreaking moment when she knew there was no love or hope or life left in the world, because her baby had died in his father's arms.)

(She remembers sitting beside them all through a long, awful, empty night, begging the aliens she hated and the god she didn't believe in to come and take her too.)

What she doesn't remember and never will is how or why she got up and kept on moving. Somehow she ends up in a house a few blocks away, where the blast had damaged but not destroyed buildings. Whoever lived there was gone, but they had a carton of water bottles on the counter and a baseball bat by the front door. She's not sure that she'd want to save herself if the aliens came for her but she keeps the bat with her anyway. She might want to smash something with it.

Anne recognises no day or night, no world outside the house. She lies under the table and cries until she can physically cry no more, and then curls herself into a ball, dozing on and off, until the tears come back. Some occasional instinct makes her force crackers and water past the lump in her throat and stagger outside to the back garden to use the bathroom behind a bush.

At one point there are voices outside. Strangers, calling for survivors. Anne doesn't answer them and doesn't move. To do either would take strength she doesn't have, and the people pass by without coming in.

Some time later - days, she thinks, but has no idea how many - Anne comes out of her daze to hear footsteps in the house. Her first impulse is to do nothing, because doing anything other than hiding is too hard. But the person sucks in a breath, like someone holding back pain, and without conscious thought Anne bites her lip, grabs her baseball bat, clambers out from under the table and creeps into the foyer.

It's a teenaged girl, blonde, with blood on her face and in her hair, an axe in one hand and a hammer in the other, and she's the first living person Anne has seen for days. 

"Hi," Anne says, forcing her voice to work. Her throat hurts from too much crying and not enough water. 

The girl opens her mouth and closes it again, as though she'd tried to speak and no words had come out. She takes a step backwards and looks at the door, as if to flee.

Anne sets the baseball bat down carefully, keeping a wary, instinctive eye on the girl's weapons. "I'm a doctor. Would you like to me to take a look at your head?" It feels absurd. Being a doctor was something that had happened a long time ago, and possibly to someone else.

The look in the girl's eyes is one Anne had seen in trauma patients, all those years ago when she did her ER rotation. "I think it's stopped bleeding," the girl says, slowly. She raises her hand and touches her head, still clutching the hammer. Her hand comes away smeared with half dried blood.

Anne finds herself suddenly terrified that the girl will walk out the door, and leave her alone again. "Want something to eat?"

"You have food?"

"I think so." Anne hadn't bothered to inspect the pantry beyond the crackers she'd been nibbling, but there has to be other food in there. "Come and have a look."

The girl follows Anne into the kitchen. She's still carrying her hammer and axe, and she doesn't put them down until Anne pulls out the rest of the crackers and a few cans of tuna. It feels like a feast, sitting there in someone else's kitchen with a girl she's just met, and even if she only eats half a can of tuna and doesn't taste it it's still the most food she's had since it happened.

"What's your name?" she asks, finally. "I'm Anne."

The girl looks at the floor and then looks up, and meets Anne's eyes for the first time. "Karen."

"Well, you can stay if you want, Karen."

Karen never really accepts the offer, but she doesn't leave, and Anne has company under the table when the sun sets. Karen doesn't cry, but she doesn't seem to mind it when Anne does.

***

Another week of nothingness, and for some reason they begin making plans. "We should get out of the city," Karen says.

"We have a cabin at Lake Huntington." Anne's not sure she can face being there again, in that space where Lee and Sammy had lived and played, but she knows there's canned food in the cupboards and fish in the lake. "We could find a car once we get out of the city."

"There are probably more people alive out there, right? I mean, they were targeting the cities. So there have to be other people out there alive."

"Maybe." Anne can't quite bring herself to believe that there are any other people left in the world. "Is that what you want to do?"

"It's not like there's anything else."

They dig a backpack out of the hall closet and start packing. The last of the canned food and bottled water, granola bars and almonds from the neighbours', a flashlight and batteries, raincoats that are too big for either of them. Karen goes hunting for sleeping bags but can't find any, so they roll up their blankets and wrap them in a trash bag to keep them dry, then fasten them to the backpack with belts. 

As they set out, Karen carries the axe and hammer she'd had with her when she'd arrived. They're marginally more useful than Anne's baseball bat but Anne still has the sinking, terrified feeling that they're going to war unarmed.

***

The worst part is that the bodies in the streets are decomposing now. Being indoors with the doors and windows shut had kept away most of the smell, but out here it hits in full force. Anne has to look away and breathe through her mouth as Karen vomits repeatedly.

They don't talk about it, just pull their shirts up over their mouths and noses in an attempt to filter the air and start walking once Karen's stopped shaking. 

Anne can't look around her; she fixes her eyes on a point and walks straight towards it with Karen following along behind her. The bodies are Sammy, Lee, her mother and father, everyone she's ever known. She can't stop feeling it and she can't bear to think about it, so all she can do is her best to pretend they aren't there.

They pass no one and nothing alive.

***

As the sun sets they begin to look for a place to spend the night. Anne had found that first house in a wave of panic and grief; now she looks at a row of suburban houses, so like her own, and wonders which still have people living in them and which belong to the dead. While she considers Karen straightens her back and picks a house at random. "That one?" 

Karen had survived by taking food and shelter from houses, so Anne figures following Karen's instincts isn't a bad idea. "All right."

"I'll go first."

Anne thinks she should go first - she's the adult, after all - but Karen's already walking up to the house. With the axe raised to swing, she puts her ear to the front door, apparently listening for voices or movement. Slowly, carefully, she begins to turn the handle. 

Locked.

"Window," Karen whispers.

They sneak round the side of the house, looking for an easy access point. Some disconnected point of Anne's brain can't believe they're doing this. She's a doctor, a respectable wife and mother and yet here she is, trying to break into a stranger's house.

She used to be all those things, anyway.

Karen points at a window that isn't completely shut. "Give me a boost through the window and I'll come around and open the front door."

"We could just choose another house, you know," Anne says, that option only just occurring to her.

"No, this one's fine." Karen tucks her hammer into the waistband of her jeans and grips her axe. "Ready?"

Anne crouches, links her hands together, palms upward, to make a step. "Count of three?"

Karen puts one foot on Anne's hands and together they count down. On 'one', Karen pushes off with her other foot while Anne straightens up as best she can, giving Karen just enough height to pull the window open the rest of the way.

A loud crack rings out through the silent world as the glass of the window shatters and a bullet misses Karen's head by inches. Startled, adrenaline pumping through her body, Anne steps back and falls over. Karen comes tumbling down, lands on top of Anne and instantly rolls off and picks up her dropped axe. "Gun," she says.

Anne's gasping for breath. The whole thing had happened in a few seconds. One moment there was nothing, and the next Karen was almost dead. "I think there are people there."

"Yeah." Karen stands up and holds out a hand. "Let's move."

Anne doesn't know whether she should be more scared of the person with the gun coming after them or of the possibility that any aliens around had heard the shot and were coming to investigate. She takes Karen's hand and lets herself be pulled to her feet. They run for three blocks, until they're sure they're not being followed and stop, panting, in the shade of a tree.

"Now what?" Karen asks.

They walk until dark, and spend the night in the back of a truck abandoned on the side of the road. Karen curls up in the back corner and Anne lies on the wooden floor, imagining Sam sitting in her lap and Lee's arms around both of them. 

She doesn't want to live this life without them.

***

Anne wakes the next morning without feeling like she'd ever been asleep, and can't remember why she'd thought it was a good idea to leave the last house or why she even bothered to keep breathing.

But Karen pokes her in the arm and drags her upright and bullies her into standing, and says, with a kindness Anne hadn't really expected, "Come on. Let's keep walking."

And so, because she doesn't want to leave Karen in this world alone, Anne walks.

***

By that evening, they're down to a couple of granola bars. Anne still doesn't care, not really, but Karen thinks they're near a grocery store and is determined to find it.

When they do, most of the windows have been smashed in. There are still cars in the parking lot, probably left there when the aliens first arrived, and some of them had been set on fire. There was a lot of that happening in the days between the aliens appearing and the attacks. 

"There's probably not a lot left," Anne says. 

"We might find something, though. Candy bars, even." And Karen leads the way boldly through the half-open doors. Anne follows. The stench of rotting meat is overwhelming; they'd almost stopped smelling the decomposing bodies but this is different again. Anne chokes and coughs and has to force herself to breathe through her mouth. 

She was right. This place has been looted over and over. All the canned food and most of the processed stuff is gone. Shopping carts clog the aisles and shelves and displays have been overturned. Karen digs out a bag of dried apricots from under the shelves, and Anne finds a packet of chocolate chip cookies, which is close enough to candy bars to make Karen smile for a moment. There's no protein left other than dried beans and lentils, and they have neither water nor fire nor implements to cook them with. 

"We'll find another house," Karen says. "I mean, there are lots of - " 

She stops, but Anne knows what she was going to say. Lots of houses survived the aliens. Lots of people didn't. "Yeah." 

They manage to pick up some more batteries for the flashlight, toothbrushes and toothpaste, hand sanitizer and tampons and a whole pack of toilet paper, something that's fast becoming a luxury. Anne thinks that if there was a black market, they could sell it for food. 

As they're doing a last walk round the store, looking for something, anything usable, they hear the roar of a engine somewhere in the distance. Anne can't remember the last time she'd heard that sound and it takes her a moment to register the noise, to understand what it is and what it means. 

Another engine now, and gunfire. It's coming closer. "Get down!" Anne hisses. She grabs Karen and pulls her back behind a cardboard display that had once apparently held canned vegetables. They crouch there, silent, waiting. 

The next sound is the worst. 

Aliens. Right outside. 

Karen's gripping Anne's wrist so tight that when Anne looks down, Karen's knuckles are white. Anne puts her free hand over Karen's, wondering who she'd been before the war. A high school student, obviously. Did she play sports? Was she a musician? What was she going to be when she grew up? Did she have brothers and sisters? Who were her friends? 

Anne had never asked, had never told Karen anything about herself other than that she was a doctor. She hadn't even told her about Lee and Sammy, and now they're probably going to die together. 

Anne's heart is racing and it requires every ounce of control she has to make sure the aliens don't hear her gasping for breath. This morning she had wanted to die. Now, faced with the very real prospect of death she's terrified, and wants nothing more than to live.

If she dies here now, today, no one in the world will remember Sammy and Lee, or will know they ever existed. If she dies, it will never matter that they had lived. The thought is wild and irrational but some part of her grabs it and clings on, as if that alone can save her.

"They're chasing them," Karen whispers, breathlessly. "Whoever's out there. They're chasing the aliens."

"Fighting them?"

"I think so." Karen turns her hand over and grips Anne's, which is a lot more comfortable, not least because now Anne can squeeze back.

The engines have come to a stop in the parking lot outside and for a moment, the whole world is still.

The next sound is the unmistakably alien sound of something non-human, walking or crawling or doing whatever the hell it does through the grocery store.

Karen has her axe in her free hand, raised and poised, ready to attack.

Anne holds her breath.

Gunfire rings out again and again, bullets cracking through the air. From somewhere in front of them comes a moan of pain, like nothing Anne's ever heard before, and something crashes to the floor.

"It's down!" calls a man's voice.

"Dead?"

"I think so."

"Well, make sure. We've got to get Davis to a medic."

Human footsteps now, coming closer. Anne has only a brief moment to wonder if they should show themselves or not - their last encounter with other humans hadn't exactly been pleasant - but then the footsteps stop abruptly. "Anyone there?"

Her heart racing, Anne looks at Karen, and looks around. In their race to hide they'd left their backpack and supplies in the middle of the floor. The alien hadn't recognised it as something belonging to humans, but anyone who looked at it would know that only other people would be stealing toilet paper. "Here," Anne says, willing herself to sound confident.

"We're standing up," Karen says. "Don't shoot."

They stand, slowly. The alien is only a few feet in front of them, dead or nearly dead, and two men with guns stand behind it.

"You two alone?" one asks, lowering his weapon. He's the oldest, and obviously in charge. The other still has his gun trained on the unmoving alien.

Anne looks at him. He's a stranger and she has no reason to trust him, but someone called Davis was hurt. "Do you need a doctor?" she asks, hoping for more information as if that would change anything about this situation. 

"You a medic?"

"I'm a pediatrician."

"She got slashed by that Skitter," the second man says, gesturing at the alien with his gun. "Her arm's bleeding pretty bad. Someone's trying to stop the bleeding, but we had to get rid of the alien so it couldn't follow us back to camp."

Anne looks at Karen. She's willing to trust them for now, if Karen is. If there really is a base, a camp, other survivors working together - "Where is she?"

"About a block away. Can you help her?"

"I can try, but there's not much I can do without supplies. We've been alone since the aliens attacked. Karen - grab a pack of diapers, we'll use them to staunch the blood. It's probably better than anything they've got."

One of the men had been riding a motorbike, the other a quad bike. They take Anne and Karen to where Davis, a young woman not much older than Karen, is lying limp and pale in the back of a pick-up truck while a young teenage boy, looking almost equally pale, holds his wadded up shirt to her arm. "Who's this?" he asks, looking up as they arrive.

"She's a doctor, Jimmy."

Jimmy's young enough to have been one of Anne's patients in another life. Anne climbs up beside him and gently elbows him out of the way. Even in the dim light of dusk, with Jimmy's shirt in the way, it's easy to see that it's a bad wound. The shirt is soaked in blood and in one place, where the shirt has shifted slightly, Anne sees what looks like bone.

It's been a long, long time since she did any emergency medicine. "Have you got medical supplies at your base?" she asks, ripping open the pack of diapers.

"Some, and other medical staff."

"We need to get her back there." She layers two, three, four diapers over the top of shirt and wound, tightening them into place with the belt Karen had hastily pulled off the backpack. All she can do is try to stem the bleeding and hope someone at the base is able to save the arm and the patient.

"Can you drive a stick?" the first man asks Karen. She shakes her head. "Take the quad bike, it's easy enough, and stay close. Dai, take the bike. I'll drive."

It feels like a long, slow, painful trip back to base. Davis is moaning, drifting in and out of consciousness. Anne tries to find out her first name, but she can't answer questions and Jimmy doesn't know. "Captain Weaver knows," he says, indicating the man in the cab of the pick-up.

"Captain, huh?"

"He was in the army, I think. We've got lots of military guys. Police, too. I'm learning to shoot." Jimmy's voice is almost defensive, as if he thinks Anne is going to tell him he shouldn't be fighting. He shouldn't be, but Anne won't say it.

"Who's we?" Anne asks, doing her inadequate best to offer Davis some form of comfort.

"All the survivors."

"How many of you are there?"

"Lots. Maybe a thousand."

Anne doesn't ask Jimmy about his family, the same way she hasn't asked Karen about hers. "What were you doing?"

"We were heading for the grocery store. We were going to get supplies, but then we ran into the Skitters," Jimmy says, biting his lip. Anne wonders if this was his first battle, and then it strikes her as ludicrous to be thinking that about a child of his age.

Jimmy says nothing the rest of the way.

***

From what Anne sees of the survivors' base as they pull in, it's a bunch of unused factories surrounded by a wire fence with armed sentries patrolling the perimeter. Jimmy starts yelling for a medic as soon as they've pulled up in front, and Anne hears voices inside echoing the cry as Jimmy shouts over and over and over again.

"That's enough, son," Weaver says almost gently, coming round to the back of the pick-up. "You go get yourself cleaned up and find yourself another shirt, then go down to the mess hall and get them to give you something hot."

Jimmy eyes Weaver uncertainly, reluctant to leave his patient.

"That's an order, Jimmy."

Jimmy goes, looking over his shoulder as two people arrive running, carrying a makeshift stretcher between them. They unload Davis with help from Weaver and Dai and carry her inside while Anne, bereft, sits in the back of the pick-up with bloodstained hands.

"You two sticking around?" Weaver asks. "Could always use more doctors."

"I didn't do much," Anne says. She looks over at Karen, who's sitting on the quad bike as though she's reluctant to get off.

"Doesn't matter. You did what you could. We've got families here. Children. We could use your expertise."

Children. Children who had survived the attacks, children as old as Sammy, or younger than Sammy. Children who were older now than Sammy would ever be.

Anne swallows hard. "Karen?"

"Hell yeah."

"Okay." Anne takes a deep breath, and looks around again. "We'll stay."

***

The next hour is a blur. Dai takes them to a small bathroom off the infirmary so Anne can clean the blood off her hands, and then to a small office where someone wants to know names, ages and skills and assigns them to living quarters ("single females, building B"). After that it's the large, dirty room where they dump the backpack and their blankets in an empty spot between a tattered mattress and a sleeping bag, marking out their space, and then down to the mess hall where Dai says someone will be preparing the evening meal. 

Anne feels a little breathless; everywhere she turns there's an unfamiliar face looking at her, babies crying and children playing. She can live here, God only knows that it's better than wandering from house to house, but every time she sees a child it's like a kick in the guts, a reminder she doesn't need of what she had lost.

All she wants is her baby boy in her arms, and she'll never have it again.

Never.

"Annie?"

"Anne!"

From behind a long table in the mess hall, two familiar faces are looking at her. Anne finds her legs suddenly weak as her aunt and uncle rush towards her. Relief washes over her - relief that she's no longer alone, that she no longer has to carry the burden of remembering her entire family alone. They're hugging her, patting her cheeks, stroking her hair, and then - 

"Anne, where are Lee and Sammy?"

She can't answer that question because she can't say the words aloud, and can't look at them because she can't bear to see their faces. All she can do is look away and shake her head, and press her hand to her mouth to keep back the sobs threatening to come thick and fast.

"Come outside," Scott says. Anne can barely hear him. The world seems unreal again, the way it had in the hours and days after she knew Sammy and Lee were dead. She follows him anyway, aware of Kate's arm around her waist, guiding her. Then there's darkness around her and the fresh evening air cool on her cheeks, stars and alien spaceships high overhead.

She leans against both of them, and knows they're crying with her.

***

Anne starts work in the infirmary the next day. Kate had asked over and over if she was sure about it but Anne doesn't see why she should sit around with her memories when she could be doing something, anything.

The truth is she can't bear to be doing nothing, and at least this way it means something that she's still alive.

The surgeon in charge of the infirmary tells her gently that Davis had died while they were amputating her arm, and then assigns Anne to pediatrics and general healthcare, telling her she'll be given plenty of help to get her surgical and trauma skills up to scratch. She's also given an assistant, in the form of a 19 year old pre-med student named Lourdes. Lourdes is at once eager and scared but it helps, having her around. There are times it's easier to talk Lourdes through procedures or explain things to her than it is to look a child in the eyes and see Sammy.

***

Three days after they joined the resistance, she's sitting outside the factory after finishing her shift when Karen comes in from the perimeter. With her is a teenage boy and a man carrying a child a few years older than Sammy. From the way they're looking around Anne can tell they're new here.

Karen brings them across to Anne. "Can you take them to get registered? One of the scouts found them and brought them in. I need to get back to my post." Karen's working as one of the camp's sentries, but Anne knows she's got Dai teaching her to shoot and ride motorbikes. Karen wants to be - needs to be - on the front lines of a war when she should be sitting in high school geometry.

"Sure," Anne says, as Karen leaves her alone with the newcomers. She wonders if the little boy is asleep in his father's arms, or if he's just shut down. She's seen a lot of that since she's been here.

"What is this place? Who are these people?" asks the older boy.

Anne follows the teenager's gaze around the compound. A woman nursing a baby, a man sitting silent and alone against the fence, two people who had probably been strangers yesterday crying side by side. "Survivors," she says. "I guess you could call this home."

"Are you fighting back?" the boy asks. "I saw people with guns. We can't let the aliens just take over our world - take _people_. We can't let them get away with it."

"Hal," says his father, quietly.

"We're trying," Anne says. "We're getting organised. Everyone here wants to see the aliens gone, believe me."

The man puts his son over his shoulder, and holds out a hand. "Tom Mason. This is Hal, and Matt."

Anne takes his hand and shakes it, feeling grimy, warm fingers against her own. "Anne Glass. Welcome to the resistance."


End file.
